MagAO have just spent the week at AO4ELT 4 = Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes, 4th edition. The conference was held at the UCLA conference center at Lake Arrowhead, a very nice resort where the CfAO Fall Retreat is usually held.
Here is the conference room full of AO scientists and engineers.
On Wednesday evening I went on a tour of Big Bear Solar Observatory organized by the conference. It was fun and interesting! The telescope is on a pier out in the lake, with a long narrow road going out to it: The telescope is built on a pier out in the lake for stable seeing during the day (laminar flow across the lake). We were there at night — the “off” time — and saw some beautiful moonlight over the lake. Also, life preservers were near the stairs to the basement, because the lower level can flood when the lake is high.
Visiting a solar telescope at night is like visiting a night-time-astronomy telescope during the day: You get a nice tour because the staff are able to give you their attention, and you get to go into the telescope dome and optics Coude room because they aren’t busy tracking the star(s) and collecting the photons.
We first saw the double-decker optics bench: The optical bench at Big Bear in the Coude room takes in the sunlight, corrects it with AO, and sends it to a variety of imagers, spectrographs, and magnetic field measuring devices.
Claire Max admiring the optics bench at Big Bear
Then we saw the GUIs in the control room — looks fun! The GUIs at Big Bear Solar Observatory include a single-conjugate “classical” AO system and a multi-conjugate MCAO system.
And some images of the final product: Here are some of the close-up images of the Sun taken by Big Bear Solar Observatory. The Earth could fit inside one of these sunspots.
And finally, up to the top floor to see the telescope: The full telescope. Can you find the secondary mirror?
The secondary mirror is above the primary mirror, but off to the side. This is what is called an off-axis Gregorian, and I had never seen one before. The primary mirror is a segment of a parabola and was tested and polished to its final optical shape at the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab, and aluminized at Kitt Peak. The secondary mirror being off to the side means there are no “spiders” (or support struts that look like spider legs) in the beam to cause diffraction or scattered light that make it hard to image the high-contrast regions on the Sun. We also could use such a telescope design for imaging the faintest, coolest exoplanets. An off-axis Gregorian telescope has no spiders in the beam, to reduce scattered light, making the high-contrast imaging on the Sun possible.
But I did see a spider! Not causing diffraction or scattered light in the telescope beam though.Here is a full picture of the 1.6-m telescope at Big Bear Solar Observatory.
Thanks to the staff at Big Bear for the wonderful tour!
Now back to the conference. AO4ELT is a meeting where AO scientists and engineers come together to discuss cutting-edge problems and solutions in adaptive optics. This included science cases, wavefront control, deformable mirrors, detectors, lasers, etc. Jared gave 2 talks this week, one about his plan for an “extreme AO” (ExAO) version of MagAO called MagAO-X, and one about Olivier Guyon’s ExAO system at Subaru, SCExAO: Jared gave 2 talks this week, one as himself for MagAO-X (top) and one as Olivier Guyon for SCExAO (bottom).
I had a poster about the science I am doing with MagAO and GPI to image Jupiter-like exoplanets and to measure their fundamental properties like temperature and luminosity: Vanessa came by to look at my poster and we are very excited about direct imaging of Jupiter-like exoplanets for the next generation!
Runa had a poster about the E-ELT M4 wavefront corrector, which we quite enjoyed, as it was dense with cultural and AO references: Runa had a poster about testing the wavefront of the E-ELT M4 adaptive mirror.
Laird talked about visible-light AO, for today’s and the next generation. His talk was 40 slides in 20 minutes and covered a lot of ground, and I was so taken that I forgot to get a picture of him giving the actual talk, so this will have to do: I didn’t manage to get a photo of Laird during his talk but this is a pretty good stand-in.
Laird and Brian talk GMT phasing in front of the First Light CRED poster (who supplied the refreshments).
We enjoyed many formal and informal discussions at the meeting with our friends and colleagues about our new challenges in AO: Simone, Jared, and Enrico talk Pyramid Aliasing just before the Italians leave to go home.
And finally, some wild life! This is the AO4ELT mascot enjoying the refreshments.
Hi MagAO fans… this planet discovery did not actually use MagAO (too bad!), but it includes MagAO team members Kate Follette and Katie Morzinski, and MagAO user/operator/blogger Kim Ward-Duong, and MagAO users Jenny Patience and Abhi Rajan, as well as involving our favorite technique of Extreme Exoplanet AO… so we thought you might be interested to hear about the first new planet discovered by the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI)!
Gemini is our neighboring telescope to the South on Cerro Pachon, and the Gemini Planet Imager has been mentioned on the MagAO blog before. The GPI Exoplanet Survey is a large program to look for new planets around young stars. It uses an extreme AO system with a MEMS deformable mirror to correct high-order turbulence, a specialized coronagraph to block out the light of the central star, and an integral field spectrograph to break the light into a rainbow of colors at each point in the image plane, in the 1-2 micron regime. See this blog post for more on how GPI works to see planets.
The 51 Eridani system consists of a ~20-Myr-old F-type star with a ~2000-AU-away distant pair of M dwarfs at ~6 AU from each other.
Here is a picture of the star in the sky, by Franck Marchis and Sarah Blunt — it is about 30 pc (almost 100 light years) away: Location of 51 Eri in the constellation of Eridanus (The River). With a brightness of 5 magnitude in visible and a declination of -2 degrees, the star is visible with naked eyes in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. Click here to generate this figure, credit: Aladin Sky Atlas & F. Marchis, SETI Institute; Astrostudio.com & Sarah Blunt, SETI Institute.
And a fly-by simulation of the system by Jenny Patience and James Cornelison:
Closer in to the star GPI found a planet at 13 AU — which would be a little bit outside the orbit of Saturn in our Solar System. Here is the discovery image, by Julien Rameau and Christian Marois: Discovery image of the planet 51 Eridani b with the Gemini Planet Imager taken in the near-infrared light on December 18 2014. The bright central star has been mostly removed to enable the detection of the exoplanet one million times fainter. Credit: Julien Rameau (UdeM) and Christian Marois (NRC Herzberg)
Here is an artist’s conception of the system, as seen from near the planet, by Danielle Futselaar and Franck Marchis: An artistic conception of the Jupiter-like exoplanet, 51 Eri b, seen in the near-infrared light that shows the hot layers deep in its atmosphere glowing through clouds. Because of its young age, this young cousin of our own Jupiter is still hot and carries information on the way it was formed 20 million years ago. Credit: Danielle Futselaar & Franck Marchis, SETI Institute
An integral part of GPI (haha…) is the Integral Field Spectrograph that takes a little spectrum of every point in the image. This way, we can discover the planet, as well as measure its properties like its temperature, at the same time. Check this movie out which shows the brightness of the planet at each wavelength, in two different ways of looking at it, by Robert De Rosa and Christian Marois: (It’s an animated gif… I hope it works on your browser/device.) The Gemini Planet Imager utilizes an integral field spectrograph, an instrument capable of taking images at multiple wavelengths‚or colors‚ of infrared light simultaneously, in order to search for young self-luminous planets around nearby stars. The left side of the animation shows the GPI images of the nearby star 51 Eridani in order of increasing wavelength from 1.5 to 1.8 microns. The images have been processed to suppress the light from 51 Eridani, revealing the exoplanet 51 Eridani b (indicated) which is approximately a million times fainter than the parent star. The bright regions to the left and right of the masked star are artifacts from the image processing algorithm, and can be distinguished from real astrophysical signals based on their brightness and position as a function of wavelength. The spectrum of 51 Eridani b, on the right side of the animation, shows how the brightness of the planet varies as a function of wavelength. If the atmosphere was entirely transmissive, the brightness would be approximately constant as a function of wavelength. This is not the case for 51 Eridani b, the atmosphere of which contains both water (H20) and methane (CH4). Over the spectral range of this GPI dataset, water absorbs photons between 1.5 and 1.6 microns, and methane absorbs between 1.6 and 1.8 microns. This leads to a strong peak in the brightness of the exoplanet at 1.6 microns, the wavelength at which absorption by both water and methane is weakest. Credit: Robert De Rosa (UC Berkeley), Christian Marois (NRC Herzberg, University of Victoria)
Well, as I said above, please see the paper (ArXiv version) and the press release for the full story. Thanks for reading. We’re so excited for GPI’s first planet, and we can’t wait to look at it with MagAO!
What did you do with your leap second? Tonight we stared at thick monsoon-y clouds for an extra second. And then (many hours later) we went to bed.
Here’s the almost-full moon rising at sunset. Moon Rise at Sun Set
There was also going to be a spectacular conjunction of Jupiter and Venus, but I couldn’t see it behind the lightning. Here’s a panorama from the balcony at sunset: Sun Set Panorama
It was a bittersweet night as we say goodbye to Vanessa, who has put her considerable skills and efforts to work making the LBTI run efficiently, over her past several years as a PhD student at Arizona. It is time, and she is graduating and moving on to a postdoctoral position with the Gemini Planet Imager at Stanford and Livermore National Lab. Thanks to Vanessa’s hard work and dedication, new people such as Amali, Eckhart, Carl, and Jordan are being trained so that the whole operation can keep running once she leaves: Vanessa’s last night. Out with a wimper, thanks to the clouds.
As for myself, I came on this run to compare and contrast the operations and instruments of MagAO and LBTI. I have just recovered from a 6.5-week MagAO run and so it is fresh in my mind. First of all, let’s marvel at all this monitor real-estate that LBTI has. Not only are there 4 monitors for the AO guis and webpages, but there is a monitor overhead with the weather station, and an extra little L-offshoot of the desk to set your laptop for taking logs: Marvel at all this monitor real-estate that LBTI has.
Just for a comparison, I set up the AO windows MagAO-Style on 2 monitors. Note that I placed my laptop in front with the logsheet, and my iPad as the weather station, and the dinner plate — to really give you an impression of MagAO style. LBTI doesn’t have the Fast-Mirror Viewer but they do have the Technical Viewer and the PT Spiral so I put those in that place: MagAO-Style 2 monitors.
Now, when you think about it, the LBT has two 8.4-m mirrors (and 4 monitors for each AO system for each mirror) while Magellan has one 6.5-m mirror. So that means LBTI should have 1.67 times as many monitors as MagAO. I guess they rounded up.
So what have I learned, comparing and contrasting these 2 complex systems?
Well, while our AO systems under the hood are almost identical, the start-up and loop-closing procedures are quite different. Take the case of acquisition. With MagAO we slew to a target, the TO does a Shack-Hartmann with our guider, and then hands off a fairly flat wavefront to AO — then we preset the reconstructor and binning, and close the loop with a 10 modes gain vector, and finally hit it with auto-gain for a final closed loop. LBTI doesn’t have a guider, so there are low-order aberrations that the AO operator must take out by hand, by applying nanometers of wavefront to M2. This has to happen before the loop closes, so it is part of the acquisition the AO operator does. Finally, the preset for LBTI is a bit different than the MagAO preset, and seems to be a bit buggy in terms of timing out, so the AO operator often sets up the reconstructor and binning by hand — which is also easier for LBTI because most targets are the same brightness. The 10 modes loop is a reconstructor not a gain vector, so that’s why it has to be set by hand after acquisition, preset, and static aberration correction. So a very complicated system in a different way.
LBTI has many complicated operator interactions, since both the TO and the AO operator can control the ASM. It also has a “200% efficiency” element as we have with MagAO, in terms of 2 science cameras that can operate simultaneously — in this case LMIRCam and NOMIC. This leads to some of the same conversations as we have between Clio and VisAO, where the LMIRCam and NOMIC operators communicate to make sure each has obtained the data before nodding or moving to a new target. However, the two telescope PSFs showing up on the science camera makes for additional complexity, in that the LMIRCam operator must do a test nod to figure out which PSF is which.
There are a couple things I miss from MagAO. One is the Fast Mirror Viewer that Alfio made to show the peak mirror commands vs. time — it has become my go-to plot for monitoring the loop status. Here it is after an earthquake last month: The fast-mirror viewer captured an earthquake at LCO last month.
Another thing I miss is the chefs. Someone turned down the temperature of the visitor fridge at LBTI yesterday and the food was warm and smelled bad…
But what does LBTI have that we could use at MagAO? Vanessa, Amali, and the team spend a lot of time creating useful explanatory diagrams, so that the wiki is quite comprehensive and informative. Take a look at this diagram Amali made tonight — incredibly useful for diagnosing wavefront errors on the pyramid: Cheat sheet for diagnosing wavefront errors on the pyramid.
A lot of work has gone into making LBTI operable remotely from Tucson, so things like the power controllers for the AO hardware are accessed via a webpage. Part of Vanessa’s dissertation has been working on non-common-path aberrations, and tonight she showed me the method for determining optical gain, which is variable and thus necessary to determine before the amplitude of an NCPA can be known. For another thing, the telescope-level plots are extremely thorough — for example, I can lookup the temperature of the steel struts in the telescope structure. And finally, the LBTI has 2 primary mirrors, 2 AO systems, and many modes — from IR imaging to nulling interferometry. It makes for a complex instrument with a lot of amazing capabilities! As soon as these clouds clear up.
Lately we’ve been losing sleep, praying hard to be counting stars:
MagAO has been well represented here at the Spirit of Lyot conference, despite being a much smaller team than the other big AO planet finding instruments. Here are a few more pictures from our presentations over the past few days.
Me presenting early results form our GAPplanet Survey (exciting results to be announced soon!)
Katie, in a convincing Laird Close disguise, presents her work on characterization of the Beta Pic exoplanet.
As a number of MagAO team members are currently at the “In the Spirit of Bernard Lyot 2015” Conference in Montréal, Québec, we’ll have a couple blog posts this week discussing this exciting direct imaging-focused conference. Spirit of Lyot is a large meeting held every 3-5 years focused on the imaging of extrasolar planets and circumstellar disks. Along with all of the hot-off-the-press science results in the field, the meeting is particularly focused on the innovative new instrumentation, and technologies in development or currently on-sky to pave the way to new discoveries.
A great overview with some very cool MagAO updates were shared yesterday by Laird, the second talk of the conference:
(sorry for the blurry photographic evidence, it really is Laird! The conference hall is very large…)
Laird highlighted the many unique capabilities of MagAO and the strengths of going to visible wavelengths. As VisAO has demonstrated soundly, visible light observations offer many scientific advantages: you can detect strong emission lines like H-alpha, you have a better chance of distinguishing object characteristics with wider color-magnitude diagrams, can obtain a nice estimate of the extinction due to dust, and of course achieve much improved spatial resolution! With the adaptive secondary, which is more robust to lost actuators, MagAO’s performance on-sky in terms of RMS wavefront error is ~135 nm and right at the error budget from the lab estimates, providing ideal resolution to do this science with exceptional sensitivity.
Laird also made sure to talk about the many exciting recent results and ones coming soon, both disks and planet detection/characterization, with a run down of projects by Ya-Lin (new paper just hit arXiv! on the low-mass companion 1RXS J1609B), Jared, Katie, and Kate — more coming soon on these last two projects as the talks are being given later today!
Later in the afternoon, Gilles Otten, who was at MagAO with Matt Kenworthy back in early May (see their blogs from that run here), presented brand-new instrumentation results from testing their new vortex apodizing phase plate (VAPP) coronagraphs. In case you missed it, there are a ton of details in yesterday’s blog recapping the press release. But here are a few photos, too:
Gilles gave a great talk with very exciting observations showing the two complementary PSFs from this coronagraphic system and the excellent contrast on Clio. A few of the first targets were a few famous stellar binaries (Alpha Cen, Beta Cen):
And the performance on-sky was very close to the predicted performance!
You can also follow along with all of the updates using the hashtag #LYOT2015 on Twitter and Facebook! Click here to see the real-time Twitter results.
